We headed out to the parking garage, arranged everyone into Bianca’s car and mine, and headed over to Arturo’s, an aging Italian place that knew us all by name. The hostess showed us to our usual booth—way in the back so we wouldn’t disturb the more civilized customers—and brought us drinks.
As we bantered and ordered and plowed through a basket of breadsticks, I could barely keep up with the conversation. Hell, when the food arrived, I had to stare at my plate of cannelloni for a moment before I realized that, yes, this was what I ordered. I didn’t remember ordering at all.
All through lunch, my mind kept wandering back to the weekend. Back to every moment with Rick.
Sure, there’d been a bump in the road, and the club had turned out to be a bad idea, but he’d recovered from that and we’d still had an amazing time. God, wasn’t that an understatement. Rick was such a beautiful submissive. Willing. Eager. Adventurous. And I looked forward to the aftercare almost as much as I did the scene or the sex. Lying beside him, relaxing, rubbing lotion on his welts or helping work stiffness out of a muscle, kissing, talking…
Everything we did, I loved. I wasn’t aroused by the memories, I wasn’t turned off. I was just…preoccupied. Shell-shocked in a way. It had been a great weekend, but now my mind and body were both crashing. Fatigue. Overload. Having to function like a normal human being, surrounded by people but touching none of them.
An elbow in my side brought me out of my thoughts and back into the cramped booth at Arturo’s.
“Hey, what’s wrong with you?” Teagan cocked her head.
“Sorry.” I gestured dismissively. “Just lost in thought, I guess.”
Bianca giggled. “Thinking about Cal’s mom at the table again?”
Cal groaned.
I laughed. “Yeah, that’s it. What can I say? A woman with that much experience requires a lot of imagination to satisfy. So I always have to think up—”
“McNeill, I’m so fucking serious.” Cal gestured at me with a steak knife. “If you mention fucking my mom again…”
I shrugged. “Okay, well, there was the other night with your sister, and—”
“My sister?” He grimaced. “Dude, have you seen my sister?”
“No, I can’t say I have.”
He shuddered. “Yeah. You just…no.”
“So what you’re saying,” I deadpanned, “is that your mom is hotter than your sister?”
Cal buried his face in his hands and groaned while the rest of us laughed.
“Sorry, man,” I said without an ounce of sincerity. “You walked into that one.”
“You really did.” Bianca patted his shoulder. “But it’s okay, we still love you.”
“And your mom still loves Jon,” Teagan said.
Everyone except for Cal burst out laughing. He flipped us all off, rolled his eyes and kept eating. That was what I loved about this group. We all knew where the lines were when it came to ribbing each other, or sexual innuendo and explicit topics, and though we all pushed the envelope hard, it was known that any requests of “no, this needs to stop” were to be immediately respected.
These were people with whom I spent in excess of forty hours a week. I knew them, and they knew me. We’d all learned to give Scott space if he didn’t make any jokes in his first fifteen minutes of work. We boys didn’t have to—and didn’t dare—question Bianca and Teagan when the former couldn’t stop eating potato chips and the latter went to the vending machines for chocolate at ten in the morning. The cracks about Cal’s mom and me always stopped if he responded with tight-lipped silence. Everyone knew when Teagan called it quits with her ex-boyfriend, Scott had fallen in love with his current girlfriend, and my second wife and I had separated, all before any announcements were made.
The food on my plate was getting less and less appetizing as pieces began to fall together in my brain. These people could read me like a book. Which meant they knew when anything significant in my life had changed. Which meant it was only a matter of time before they picked up on something. Perhaps not exactly what, but they’d catch the scent, and sooner or later, the little tells would accumulate.
And suddenly I’d have to explain and define something I couldn’t explain or define. Things were too casual to use the word boyfriend but too deep to use the word casual. Not that I was obligated to answer questions or tip my hand, but I wanted to keep this under wraps for now. I didn’t like denying it. Self-deprecating comments didn’t feel right when it came to my relationship with Rick.
If I was going to keep this under wraps, though, I had to keep the business-as-usual fa?ade going, and spacing out at the table during lunch wouldn’t help any. I forced myself to fall into the conversation, which currently involved everyone accusing Silent Dave of using his giant headphones to listen for signals from the mother ship. I played along. Anything to keep them from seeing how hard I was dragging right then. This didn’t hurt, not like a hangover, but it had the same effect, in a weird way. The price of a spectacular weekend—feeling not-so-spectacular afterward.